The nine (or more) lives of Julius Nyerere

Julius Kambarage Nyerere, whose death 10 years ago was commemorated in a number of countries on October 14, is likely to remain enigmatic for many reasons.

One of them is that he did not deem it necessary to leave the world with anything in the form of an autobiography.

On a number of occasions, he stated that he was averse to writing his memoirs, sometimes claiming his life amounted to nothing to write home about and on occasion wondering whether he dared to freeze in print what he knew and how that would play out with the other leaders he had interacted with.

He seemed to be concerned mostly with what had transpired during the tense years leading to the liberation of Southern Africa, roughly between the mid 1970s and 1990s.

But he may also have been more than slightly uncomfortable with his domestic scorecard: The sick economy he left behind, partly occasioned by blanket nationalisations and forcible removals of peasants; the undemocratic practices under his regime, including the banning of political parties, the abolition of co-operatives, local governments, trade unions and other civil society organisations; the muscular clampdown on student protests, and so on.

Even events that his most committed detractors could not accuse him of having caused, such as the 1964 army mutiny, would have been embarrassing episodes to narrate, as would have been the calling in of British forces to quell the mutiny for him hardly three years after he had sent his erstwhile colonial masters packing.

Maybe it is as well, after all, that he did not write his own story.

It has been said that people write autobiographies to tell lies about themselves and their deeds, and fiction to tell the truth.

Our loss, then, that Mwalimu never wrote a novel.

The lack has provided would-be biographers with a gold mine to explore and exploit — for, apart from two well written, if beholden works published three decades ago, we are left with precious little material on which to base our appreciation of Kambarage.

So then, let the gold diggers get to work.

They can take courage from one observation some of us made in the last years of the great man’s life, when we wanted to know from him whether he was writing his life-story and drew the polite negative.

Never once did he suggest that he would not let anyone write his biography or that he would not talk to whosoever wanted to do the job, only that he himself would not do it.

Once, during an exchange on the subject, I asked whether he would receive me in Butiama, and his answer was, typically, “I haven’t banned anyone from Butiama.”

But what would a biographer look for that would paint a complete picture of this man — without being unnecessarily iconoclastic yet doing justice to him?